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If you believe – as in: if you believe that if you went into it thoroughly you believe that you would believe – that Noam Chomsky is a monster, but have better things to do with your life than wade through all the disgustingness that would prove it, then this is the interview you should read. My thanks to David Thompson. August 21st, 2012 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
 A few days ago I stuck up a couple of postings here pertaining to the forthcoming US Presidential election, one specifically about Paul Ryan, and the other about, more generally, whether it makes sense to worry about which particular lizard is elected Lizard King. Does the fact that the wrong lizard might get in really signify? My own opinion is that it all depends on the Tea Party, people who I want to believe to be good people with good ideas. I would like the Tea Party to make a big and visibly decisive difference to America electing the least worst lizard to be Lizard King. That would mean that they would then really count for something. But what I would really like would be for the Tea Party then to use the clout they thus amass to subject the new Lizard King to political pressures such that, whatever his personal inclinations or past habits, the new Lizard King finds himself obliged to do Tea Party things. By which I mean run the US government less like a sting-the-suckers-for-all-they-have crime syndicate. To put all that another way, I really want to believe that this (by David Kirby and Emily Ekins for the Cato Institute) is true:
That’s as far as I’ve so far read. There’s another fifty or more pages. Meanwhile … I wish. August 21st, 2012 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the government doesn’t define what happiness is. You do. – Paul Ryan, quoted in this report. What do our American commenters make of this guy? He seems to make a lot of good noises, which I think is a hell of a lot better than no good noises. Put it this way, if America did not now vote for these good noises, that would really be a disaster, I think. August 16th, 2012 | 44 comments - (Comments are closed)
Peter Schiff is an economics guru held in high esteem by several of my libertarian acquaintances, and he is is starting a gold-based bank. The good news:
The bad news:
In the comments on my previous posting here, about what went wrong and when, much was made of the idea that in addition to knowing what went wrong it would help a lot if we can also say how to put it right. Personally, I believe that “politics” is never going to sort this mess out, certainly not politics alone. What might is people just recreating the gold standard on a freelance basis, by such means as joining in with enterprises of the sort described above. Yes, governments can shut such things down, as the above report makes abundantly clear. But if large numbers of people start placing side bets in enterprises of this sort, then it starts to become politically hazardous to just forbid such arrangements. One of my favourite slogans just now is: “This isn’t gold going up; it’s the dollar (the pound, the euro, the yen, the whatever) going down.” That is because I consider this to be the basic idea behind a non-state imposed (which is the good kind of) gold standard. When large numbers of people measure state fiat currencies by how badly they do against gold, rather than gold by how “well” it is doing against this or that collapsing currency, then that is surely the beginning of the end for these currencies. August 10th, 2012 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
One of my understandings of the current financial mess that the world is in concerns when the various contending diagnosticians think that the rot set in. The earlier the more Austrianist, seems to be the rule. Instapundit recently linked to a piece by James Pethokoukis concerning the diagnosis offered by Robert Hetzel. Hetzel thinks the problems only got seriously serious around 2008. Until then, it had been a bit up and down, but nothing that bad. But then, in 2008, the Fed, and central banks the world over, adopted money supply policies that were too restrictive. By not creating enough more money at that moment, the Fed turned a little temporary difficulty into a far bigger difficulty. I’m not an expert on this stuff, but this is similar to what Milton Friedman et al said about what triggered the Great Depression, is it not? Hetzel is, I presume, some kind of Friedmanite Monetarist. He reckons he knows exactly how to skipper the nationalised industrial ship that is money. I reckon he doesn’t. For if Detlev Schlichter and the other Austrianists are right (I think they are), the rot set in a long, long time before 2008. The idea that, if things had been handled just that little bit more deftly in 2008 all could have been well – bar a slight bump or two – is just wrong. The world by then was full of bad investments, and these investments were – are – going to have to be liquidated if the world economy is ever going to start motoring again. Encouraging even more bad investment, which is what Hetzel is saying should have been done, would only have made the grief still to come that much more grievous. Whether James Pethokoukis agrees with Hetzel with anything resembling the vehemence with which I disagree with Hetzel, I do not know. Perhaps he just wants an excuse to blame everything on President Obama. But if the Austrianists are right (they are – reprise), it goes way back, to Nixon and before, to the very creation of central banks as a means of sucking wealth out of economies (traditionally to wage war) without people getting the chance to complain too loudly in some sort of parliament. The idea that Obama, or for that matter George W. Bush, could have entirely solved the world’s present financial problems, i.e. solved them without any political grief, is absurdly mistaken. They could make it worse and they both did, with only a bit less Hetzelism than Hetzel now thinks they should have perpetrated. The idea that, with one Hetzelian bound, they could have freed us all from any grief is crazy. As is the idea that dumping Obama and replacing him with someone less malevolent, anti-American, socialistic, Christian, atheist, Muslim, environmentalist, Chicagoan, incoherent, lazy, golf-loving, devoted to black magic (take your pick), will fix everything. In my opinion dumping Obama would be better than not dumping him. But doing this could merely be the difference between jumping off the cliff instead of sliding down it. August 9th, 2012 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
If conservative Republicans can’t understand that fewer people want to associate with them because they lied when they said they favored a government that did less and spent less, nothing can save the party of Lincoln from eventual receivership. And if liberal Democrats can’t fully grasp that voters are turned off not by the color of Obama’s skin but by the failure of his presidency, they too will continue to see fewer and fewer people marching under their banner. July 30th, 2012 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Obama also wishes us to believe that, because successful producers learned something from government teachers, used government roads and bridges, employed government research, and the like, this means they don’t really own their success or wealth. Rational Americans know full well that the government funds such things by forcibly confiscating the wealth of producers. Rational Americans also know that a bum is as free to use a government bridge as is a successful business owner, but the business owner chose to apply his intelligence and work hard to build something great.” In some ways, Obama’s assertion that we don’t really deserve credit for, or earn, what we produce because of such factors is a bit like the idea that the guard-dog that protects our house owns it, not the owner. I get the impression that Obama’s comments are causing him quite a lot of damage, and I hope he continues to be pounded for them. July 20th, 2012 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
I would like to think it means something that this story is in the Metro, a London free paper, but it is probably there only because the video of the robbers running for their lives is so funny. Other than where it appears, there is nothing unusual about the story. Gun use for self defense seems quite common. July 18th, 2012 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here is a terrific piece on the problems posed by the mounting costs of funding retirement, and the tax implications thereof, from Reason’s Nick Gillespie. It is obviously written from a US perspective but as always, the lessons are broader than that. I particularly liked how he lampoons old Baby Boomers calling for a return of the draft. That bad idea never seems to entirely die off. July 12th, 2012 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a lot of conflicting opinion being fired at the US Supreme Court’s ruling(PDF) on “Obamacare”. It is certainly a curious ruling both on first and subsequent reads. I think the opinions in the decision make a great deal of, perhaps complete, sense when viewed in the terms of ‘doing a Marbury v Madison‘. That was a decision written by Chief Justice Marshall in 1803. From that decision, Marshall is regarded as the founder of the Supreme Court and the Judicial branch as it came to be understood and accepted in the balance of powers. In this article, I am not addressing the merits of the Affordable Care Act, I am speaking to the Constitutional elements at work in the decision. Roberts declares his view of judicial legislating in one succinct sentence. “It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.” Notice he said “political” choices. If something can be allowable under the Constitution, then a restrained Court goes out of its way to accommodate it to the Constitution. If something is Constitutionally permissible, then whether or not to do it is entirely within the sphere of politics, not Constitutional law. We will never find perfect masters and expecting the Supreme Court to attempt that role is contrary to limited government. Roberts appears to be channeling Mencken with this declaration. → Continue reading: A good day for limited government June 29th, 2012 | 128 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free. – P. J. O’Rourke June 29th, 2012 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
There might be a tendency, I think, among some world-weary types to say that this whole “Fast and Furious” disaster now unravelling is nothing more than the US equivalent of the sort of “Westminster Village” obsessions that we Brits got engrossed over more than a year ago. Nothing much to see here, please move along, etc. But I don’t see it that way. The use of executive privilege to squash oversight of key decisions made by this administration seems to be a serious matter that ought to concern the wider public, not least as people got killed and hurt. Jennifer Rubin weighs in on the subject of the lamentable US Attorney General, Eric Holder:
Bear in mind this appeared in the Washington Post, the same newspaper that we associate with the Watergate scandal, and hardly a bastion of the “vast rightwing conspiracy”. June 28th, 2012 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
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